excuse of his colleagues, who held the Arabian notion, that
medical aid was unavailing, and that the contagion justified
flight. He saw the plague twice in Avignon, first in the year
1348, from January to August, and then twelve years later, in the
autumn, when it returned from Germany, and for nine months spread
general distress and terror. The first time it raged chiefly
among the poor, but in the year 1360, more among the higher
classes. It now also destroyed a great many children, whom it had
formerly spared, and but few women.

The like was seen in Egypt. Here also inflammation of the lungs
was predominant, and destroyed quickly and infallibly, with
burning heat and expectoration of blood. Here too the breath of
the sick spread a deadly contagion, and human aid was as vain as
it was destructive to those who approached the infected.

Boccacio, who was an eye-witness of its incredible fatality in
Florence, the seat of the revival of science, gives a more lively
description of the attack of the disease than his non-medical
contemporaries.

It commenced here, not as in the East, with bleeding at the nose,
a sure sign of inevitable death; but there took place at the
beginning, both in men and women, tumours in the groin and in the
axilla, varying in circumference up to the size of an apple or an
egg, and called by the people, pest-boils (gavoccioli). Then
there appeared similar tumours indiscriminately over all parts of
the body, and black or blue spots came out on the arms or thighs,
or on other parts, either single and large, or small and thickly
studded. These spots proved equally fatal with the pest-boils,